Are Flipkart Kidults getting monotonous?

Flipkart launched a series of new campaigns marketing Flipkart Fashion featuring the famous Kidults. Social Samosa takes a look at the campaign and how Flipkart Kidults are growing with the brand?

Flipkart launched a series of witty campaign featuring the brand’s favourite kidults. Created for Flipkart Fashion, the new campaign talks about establishing the brand as an ultimate destination for every shopper as compared to last year’s attempt of promoting Flipkart as an accessible and affordable everyday trends destination.

Ideally fashion shoppers can be broadly classified into brand lovers, celebrity trends followers, budget seekers, unique/exclusive selection seekers and fashion advice seekers. These different types of fashion shoppers are the cornerstone of this year’s campaign. The ads have been conceptualized by Lowe Lintas, Bangalore.

In addition to promoting the above videos online, the brand with the help of influencers like Rohan Joshi is sharing tips with customers. The intension of the activity is to highlight the varied range of products across categories – from shoes, wedding attire, gym track to office wear.

Using the hashtag #FirstOnFlipkart, the brand is seen sharing more videos on YouTube about new products being added to their site.

Gearing Up for Republic Day

On account of Republic Day, the brand is prepping up for the Republic Day sale, which will kickstart from January 21 to 23 this year.

Salutes are reserved for the best. This 21st to 23rd Jan, gear up for the Flipkart Republic Day Sale – a sale that is worth a salute. Get ready to be amazed by great deals and exciting offers coming your way soon! https://t.co/t9rTasokop

In 2010-11, there was immense inhibition among consumers with regards to online shopping. The challenge that e-commerce brands faced was to create awareness about the array of products added with safety from online frauds. Flipkart aimed at achieving this while breaking clutter with a strong brand recall.

Enter – Happy Creatives (now called Happy mcgarrybowen) into the picture. They came up with the idea of having kids behaving like adults in Flipkart commercials.

The idea behind using kids as adults was to infuse a cute appeal and highlight the idiosyncrasies which an adult consumer would end up doing. Also bring to the front, that the online shopping is a child’s play. After a number of other creative routes, Lowe Lintas, which came on board with Flipkart in 2014, went back to using children to send across their message. Ever since that, Flipkart has continued to feature kidults in their commercials.

Flipkart kidults stand out as the kids depict adult mannerisms on point and have always managed to etch a smile and impress the consumers.

From talking about the ever changing fashion norms and how Flipkart can simplify the problem to talking about Flipkart Assured to promoting the brand’s Big Billion Day sale offers, the brand has time and again banked on the popularity of these little brand mascots.

Expert View: Are Flipkart Kidults getting monotonous?

We spoke to Saurabh Uboweja to get his views on the recent Flipkart Fashion commercials, the brand’s social media strategy, and if kidults continue to add the same value to the brand.

Saurabh Uboweja, International Brand Expert and CEO Brands of Desire said, “The commercials follow a tightly bound script around their value propositions, be it celebrity fashion, exclusive range of products or making available all leading brands in one place.”

“One disadvantage of this approach is that the same customer is unlikely to watch all the five commercials missing out on what may be relevant to her specifically. The other flipside to Flipkart Fashion commercials is the lack of a single compelling proposition for fashion buyers. When you try to position your brand as everything for everyone, you usually end up getting perceived as nothing for no one. The commercials are largely in line with Flipkart’s signature portrayal of children in real life settings, which is useful for brand recall but appears monotonous.”

Talking about their other social media activities, he points out, “For a large marketplace brand like Flipkart, one of the biggest challenges is reputation management. Irrespective of how creative or engaging the content is, majority of the comments to social media posts are linked to poor quality products or service which ends up being more damaging than benefiting to Flipkart. ”

Uboweja explained that Flipkart is chasing a dominant leadership status for online fashion retailing in India. With Flipkart Fashion, Myntra and Jabong all being a part of Flipkart, they control over 60 percent of the online market share, one of the fastest growing categories with higher average selling prices and net margins. They are clearly ahead of the pack as a combined unit.

“Firstly, these kids have helped to cut through the crowded e-commerce market and secondly, made a large part of the population believe that if kids can do it, why can’t we?”

“See it is not about kids getting monotonous, it depends on how interesting your script is. Tomorrow if adults become monotonous, will brands be able to do without having them in their commercials? Remove kids from Flipkart ads and they will also start appearing similar to other e-commerce brands like Amazon, Myntra and others.”

So, Flipkart now needs to find out how interestingly they can narrate their stories with kids Pops explains.

Echoing similar views, Joybrato Dutta, Creative Director, Scarecrow Communications says, “Yes, it does look monotonous, but I guess there is no harm in using kids. After all, these kids have been able to impart a distinctive visual imagery to Flipkart ads, which helps them to stand out from the clutter. “

Conclusion

Reportedly, this year, both Amazon and Flipkart will adopt different strategies to compete with each other. While, Flipkart will concentrate on attracting more customers in smaller cities and towns with their own brand of consumer products, Amazon, will look to increase their range of offerings for the premium customers.

According to a recent report, Flipkart Fashion has emerged as a dominant player in the online retail space and in the last 12-18 months, their aim was to grow the fashion business rapidly on which the brand is clearly working from a marketing stand point.

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Sarmistha has over 7 years of experience in the field of journalism. She has covered beats like business, media, advertising and digital over the years. Started her career with Business Standard and has also worked with trade media portals like BestMediaInfo and Exchange4media.com. She is fond of diary writing and loves to pen down her thoughts in it.
Sarmistha is an alumna of the prestigious Presidency College, Kolkata and Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal.